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Australia is blessed with a fascinating mix of native flora. Its distinctive plants include the gum tree or eucalypt, of which there are some 700 species. Other common plants are wattle, banksia, waratahs, bottlebrushes, paperbarks and tea trees. Flora of Australia consists of 15,638 native species, 1,952 naturalised species giving a total of 17,590 species. 83 species are presumed extinct
On the subject of extinct plants, the botanical find of the century occured in Australia in 1997. A lonely stand of conifers, the last of their kind and thought to have been extinct way before humans walked the earth were discovered in Wollemi National Park. The 23 odd-looking pines, stretching up to 40 metres through the canopy of a deep and inaccessible gorge, are from a group that once covered the southern supercontinent of Gondwana. What has astonished botanists above all, however is that these prehistoric giants were living within 150 kilometres of Sydney, Australia's largest city, in a country with a well developed scientific infrastructure and a long history of botanical research. Many researchers have marvelled at the fact that a new genus of pine could be uncovered on the doorstep of a city of four million people.
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